(Instead he had left the house with Cubby and endured a silent five-minute walk, each equally aware of the enormous shortfall that filled all the space between them.
The playing field belonged to St Thomas’s. It had been sunny and deserted. They had divided into two teams of three, because Declan had a friend staying for the weekend. The friend, who clearly hero-worshipped Fats, had joined Fats and Cubby’s team.
Fats and Cubby passed to each other in silence, while Barry, easily the worst player, had yelled, cajoled and cheered in his Yarvil accent as he tore up and down the pitch they had marked out with sweatshirts. When Fergus scored, Barry had run at him for a flying chest bump, mistimed it and smashed Fergus on the jaw with the top of his head. The two of them had fallen to the ground, Fergus groaning in pain and laughing, while Barry sat apologizing through his roars of mirth. Fats had found himself grinning, then heard Cubby’s awkward, booming laugh and turned away, scowling.
And then had come that moment, that cringeworthy, pitiful moment, with the scores equal and nearly time to go, when Fats had successfully wrested the ball from Fergus, and Cubby had shouted, ‘Come on, Stu, lad!’
‘Lad.’ Cubby had never said ‘lad’ in his life. It sounded pitiful, hollow and unnatural. He was trying to be like Barry; imitating Barry’s easy, unself-conscious encouragement of his sons; trying to impress Barry.
The ball had flown like a cannon ball from Fats’ foot and there was time, before it hit Cubby full in his unsuspecting, foolish face, before his glasses cracked, and a single drop of blood bloomed beneath his eye, to realize his own intent; to know that he had hoped to hit Cubby, and that the ball had been dispatched for retribution.)
They had never played football again. The doomed little experiment in father-son togetherness had been shelved, like a dozen before it.
He was sure he had heard it. Cubby must have been talking about him. They had been in his room. Who else could Cubby have been talking about?
Fats pulled the computer chair back into position, from the place where it had been knocked when Cubby had hit him. The authentic reaction would have been to shove his mother out of the way and punch Cubby in the face. Crack his glasses again. Make him bleed. Fats was disgusted with himself that he had not done it.
But there were other ways. He had overheard things for years. He knew much more about his father’s ludicrous fears than they thought.
Fats’ fingers were clumsier than usual. Ash spilt onto the keyboard from the cigarette in his mouth as he brought up the Parish Council website. Weeks previously, he had looked up SQL injections and found the line of code that Andrew had refused to share. After studying the council message board for a few minutes, he logged himself in, without difficulty, as Betty Rossiter, changed her username to The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother, and began to type.
V
Shirley Mollison was convinced that her husband and son were over-stating the danger to the council of leaving the Ghost’s posts online. She could not see how the messages were worse than gossip, and that, she knew, was not yet punishable by law; nor did she believe that the law would be foolish and unreasonable enough to punish her for what somebody else had written: that would be monstrously unfair. Proud as she was of Miles’ law degree, she was sure that he must have this bit wrong.
She was checking the message boards even more frequently than Miles and Howard had advised, but not because she was afraid of legal consequences. Certain as she was that Barry Fairbrother’s Ghost had not yet finished his self-appointed task of crushing the pro-Fielders, she was eager to be the first to set eyes on his next post. Several times a day she scurried into Patricia’s old room, and clicked on the web page. Sometimes a little frisson would run through her while she was hoovering or peeling potatoes and she would race to the study, only to be disappointed again.
Shirley felt a special, secret kinship with the Ghost. He had chosen her website as the forum where he would expose the hypocrisy of Howard’s opponents, and this, she felt, entitled her to the pride of the naturalist who has constructed a habitat in which a rare species deigns to nest. But there was more to it than that. Shirley relished the Ghost’s anger, his savagery and his audacity. She wondered who he might be, visualizing a strong, shadowy man standing behind herself and Howard, on their side, cutting a path for them through the opponents who crumpled as he slayed them with their own ugly truths.
Somehow, none of the men in Pagford seemed worthy to be the Ghost; she would have felt disappointed to learn that it was any of the anti-Fielders she knew.
‘That’s
‘Good point,’ said Howard.
‘I think it’s a man,’ said Shirley coolly.
When Howard left for the cafe on Sunday morning, Shirley, still in her dressing gown, and holding her cup of tea, padded automatically to the study and brought up the website.
Fantasies of a Deputy Headmaster posted by The_Ghost_of_Barry_Fairbrother.
She set down her tea with trembling hands, clicked on the post and read it, open-mouthed. Then she ran to the lounge, seized the telephone and called the cafe, but the number was engaged.
A mere five minutes later, Parminder Jawanda, who had also developed a habit of looking at the council message boards much more frequently than usual, opened up the site and saw the post. Like Shirley, her immediate reaction was to seize a telephone.
The Walls were breakfasting without their son, who was still asleep upstairs. When Tessa picked up, Parminder cut across her friend’s greeting.
‘There’s a post about Colin on the council website. Don’t let him see it, whatever you do.’
Tessa’s frightened eyes swivelled to her husband, but he was a mere three feet from the receiver and had already heard every word that Parminder had spoken so loudly and clearly.
‘I’ll call you back,’ said Tessa urgently. ‘Colin,’ she said, fumbling to replace the receiver, ‘Colin, wait —’
But he had already stalked out of the room, bobbing up and down, his arms stiff by his side, and Tessa had to jog to catch him up.
‘Perhaps it’s better not to look,’ she urged him, as his big, knobble-knuckled hand moved the mouse across the desk, ‘or I can read it and—’
One of the men hoping to represent the community at Parish Council level is Colin Wall, Deputy Headmaster at Winterdown Comprehensive School. Voters might be interested to know that Wall, a strict disciplinarian, has a very unusual fantasy life. Mr Wall is so frightened that a pupil might accuse him of inappropriate sexual behaviour that he has often needed time off work to calm himself down again. Whether Mr Wall has actually fondled a first year, the Ghost can only guess. The fervour of his feverish fantasies suggests that, even if he hasn’t, he would like to.
Colin’s face was ghastly in the light pouring out of the monitor. It was how she imagined he would look if he had had a stroke.
‘Colin—’
‘I suppose Fiona Shawcross has told people,’ he whispered.
The catastrophe he had always feared was upon him. It was the end of everything. He had always imagined taking sleeping tablets. He wondered whether they had enough in the house.
